Hey guys, whats up? Long time no see. Well, I’ve just finished my exams. At 11:00am on Satur­day June 18th I finished my 2nd year elec­tro­nic engi­nee­ring exams. No more revi­sion every­day, no more worry about not revi­sing, no more guilty nag­ging fee­ling I should be doing work, it’s all over for another year and it’s a sunny glo­rious day. So, I guess I’ll fill you all in on the back story of my exams. On May 7th I deci­ded I should start pre­pa­ring for the eight exams ahead of me, here’s the sum­mary:

1. Sys­tems and Con­trol, a look at the theo­re­ti­cal side of sys­tems, sta­bi­lity and feedback.
2. Sig­nals and Pro­ces­sing, how to analyse sig­nals, trans­form them, create radio recei­vers, fre­quency modulation.
3. Ultra Large Scale Inte­gra­tion (ULSI), the phy­sics and science of making 50nm tran­sis­tors and other nanotechnology.
4. Ana­lo­gue Design, tran­sis­tor ampli­fiers, ope­ra­tio­nal ampli­fiers, field effect transistors.
5. Digi­tal Design, mic­ro­pro­ces­sor pro­gram­ming, vhdl, assembly, PLDs, FPGAs.
6. Soft­ware Deve­lop­ment, c++, Object orien­ta­ted pro­gram­ming and Uni­fied Mode­lling Language.
7. Applied Linear Alge­bra, matrix opti­mi­sa­tion, sol­ving linear equa­tions, eigenvalues.
8. Elec­tro­nic Sys­tems, a look at relia­bi­lity design and the cons­truc­tion and use of micro sensors.

These are the exams I had ahead of me. After pla­ying a lot of Halo 2 and not really wor­king all year I deci­ded I nee­ded to really get down and do some lear­ning. And lear­ning I did, I spent 6 solid weeks revi­sing EVERY DAY for at least 5 hours, my record being 10 hours straight (think about that). I gra­dually star­ted lear­ning everything I’d cove­red over the past year but not without pro­blems, from wri­ting so much I would get repe­ti­tive strain pro­blems in my hand, I’d never feel like taking a break and it all did get a little taxing. But this last week has been the most depres­sing of weeks since I have been at uni­ver­sity. Ever­yone in my house had finished their exams by Tues­day whilst I still had three on Thurs­day, Fri­day and Satur­day mor­ning. YES, I had an exam at 9am on a Satur­day mor­ning. Not only this, but I still had not taken the most dif­fi­cult of the topics, Sig­nals and Pro­ces­sing, essen­tially two modu­les pac­ked into one, I had to learn all about fre­quency, phase and ampli­tude modu­la­tion, their crea­tion, detec­tion, effi­ciency, bene­fits, types, uses, etc… and also sig­nal pro­ces­sing, Fou­rier trans­forms, Fou­rier series, disc­rete Fou­rier trans­forms, fast Fou­rier trans­forms, auto corre­la­tion func­tions, fil­ter design, anti-aliasing fil­ters and loads of other stuff. Need­less to say, it took fore­ver and it took everything out of me and it was while ever­yone else was rela­xing, being bored and pla­ying video games. And on top of it, I had two straight after. Well, last night I mis­sed a free tic­ket to a Ben Folds gig to revise for my final exam (I’m that dedi­ca­ted) and now I’m just over­jo­yed that it’s over with. If I had to wait just a few more days before I finished I’m sure I would have crac­ked, my final exam was on the last pos­si­ble day I could have an exam.

So now I can begin doing all the things I have wan­ted to do for a long time in no spe­ci­fic order; I can com­plete Knights of the Old Repu­blic, play some more Halo 2, visit Alton Towers, spend time with my girl­friend, finish rea­ding Catch 22 and all sorts of little web­site things.

Oh by the way, my co-webmaster, Endo­fRa­dio ope­ned up his first new site for a long time the other day. It’s ama­zing he got a site com­ple­ted and publi­cally relea­sed. Any­way, if you want to see the site, you can find the Mount Eerie Pre­ser­va­tion Society over at http://​moun​tee​rie​.tri​vial​being​.net